858 Ch. 21 • The Age of European Imperialism
displayed colony after colony, however varied the structure and effective
ness of British control, colored red, the map color of Great Britain.
In Britain, the colonial experience became an important part of British
national consciousness, pervasive in literature and in material culture. The
same was true within each of the imperial powers. Newspapers, magazines,
popular literature, and the publication of soldiers’ diaries and letters car
ried home news from the colonies and made imperialism seem a romantic
adventure. In 1880, the annual Naval and Military Tournament in London
began to present reenactments of colonial skirmishes and battles. One play,
Siege of Delhi, ended with an Irish officer falling in love and dancing a jig as
the curtain falls on Indians about to be shot out of a cannon. In 1911, an
Italian writer’s enthusiasm for the feats of the Italian army in Libya
included descriptions of the “lustrous” eyes of the Sicilian horses, which
seemed, by their neighing, to be attempting to pronounce the word “Italy.” A
general’s daughter exclaims in a novel about Egypt, “Let the peace-people
croak as they please, it is war that brings out the truly heroic virtues.”
From the drawing rooms of country estates to the wretched pubs of Liv
erpool and Birmingham, the British howled for revenge for the death of
General Charles “Chinese” Gordon, killed in Sudan by the forces of the
Mahdi in 1885. Few Europeans wept at the destruction of entire cultures
and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people at the hands of Euro
pean armies. “Special artists” and then photographers began to travel with
British colonial forces; movie cameras recorded Horatio Kitchener’s 1899
campaign against the Boers in South Africa. At a time of rising political
opposition in Great Britain to costly colonial commitments, the romanti
cization of British expeditionary forces helped win support for spending
even more, and kept the Conservatives in power in 1900.
Voluntary associations pressured the colonial powers to devote more
resources to the building of empire. In Great Britain, Germany, and France,
geographic societies, associations that met periodically to listen to talks
about exploration in Africa and Asia, sponsored voyages that charted
unexplored—at least by Europeans—territories. In Germany and Britain,
naval leagues whipped up enthusiasm for imperialism. The Pan-German
League (founded in 1891) demanded more expenditures for warships. The
champion of colonial lobbying groups, the Primrose League in Britain
(founded in 1884), had 1.7 million members by 1906, drawn primarily from
business, finance, the military, and government, the groups with the great
est stake in imperialism. The lengthy economic depression that gripped Eu
rope between the mid-1870s and the mid-1890s, bringing low prices for
commodities, accentuated such lobbying for aggressive imperialism.
To be sure, strident critics of imperialism could be found. In Britain,
anti-imperialists were to be found among Liberal or Labour Party intellec
tuals, such as members of the “Ethical Union,” formed in 1896. Like Hob
son, who frequently addressed their meetings, they disparaged jingoism